Google Allo now lets you turn your selfies into cartoon stickers

In an effort to attract more users, Google is adding a new feature to its messaging app, that will please selfie lovers. The new features uses a combination of neural networks and machine learning to generate cartoon stickers out of your selfies.Just snap a selfie, and Allo will automatically generate illustrated version of you with customization option to help you personalize the stickers, and send it to your friends.Google says the new selfies to sticker feature was created using a new algorithm alongside a team of illustrators, who helped creating personalized stickers. A total of 563 quadrillion different combinations of stickers can be generated.According to Google, "To create an illustration of you that captures the qualities that would make it recognizable to your friends, we worked alongside an artistic team to create illustrations that represented a wide variety of features.""Artists initially designed a set of hairstyles, for example, that they thought would be representative, and with the help of human raters we used these hairstyles to train the network to match the right illustration to the right selfie. We then asked human raters to judge the sticker output against the input image to see how well it did. In some instances, they determined that some styles were not well represented, so the artists created more that the neural network could learn to identify as well."Currently the feature is only available for Android, and will eventually roll out to iOS.Source | Via